Artist profile

M Suriyamoorthy

1944–2012, Thanjavur and Chennai

M. Suriyamoorthy was born on 16 August 1944 in Thanjavur and died in 2012. He finished first in his class at the Government College of Arts and Crafts, Chennai, in 1963, then studied as a State Lalit Kala Akademi scholar and as a national scholar at M.S. University, Baroda, with K.G. Subramanyan and Jyoti Bhatt.

He is counted with the Madras Art Movement. His pictures use folk and temple patterns, kolam, textile motifs and scenes of daily life: mother and child, dance, markets, ceremonies and the Hindu pantheon. He ground his own colours from seashells, tree bark and his father’s unused Siddha medicines, and painted with water from Indian rivers and from temple abhishekam.

He received the Lalit Kala Akademi national award at twenty-one. Later fellowships included a senior fellowship from the Department of Culture. His work is held by the National Gallery of Modern Art, the Lalit Kala Akademi, and museums in Chennai, Hyderabad and Chandigarh.

Drawn from DAG, Galerie Belvedere and South Asian Art Gallery. No published portrait of the artist is shown here.